10 Wrestling Careers Ruined By Awful Storylines
3. Muhammad Hassan
Debuting in December 2004, Muhammad Hassan quickly became one of WWE’s most despised heels. An Arab-American wrestler with strong anti-Western beliefs, his story started off relatively strongly, but as is often the case when WWE handle potentially controversial topics, things eventually descended to ridiculousness.
As he raged against anti-Arab prejudice, Hassan became a lightning rod. There’s a chance he could have forged a long, successful career in wrestling had WWE not gone too far with the story, but inevitably, that’s exactly what they did. On an episode of SmackDown, a praying Hassan “summoned” a gang of ski mask-wearing thugs who beat The Undertaker down, then choked him out with piano wire, and that was the tipping point.
Hassan had essentially been turned into a terrorist, and the backlash was immediate. The London bombings occurred three days later, and WWE rightly took Hassan off television following pressure from their network. He was written off after The Undertaker powerbombed him through the stage at July’s Great American Bash PPV, and was released two months later. Hassan was the unfortunate victim of one of the most ill-conceived storylines in WWE history, and never wrestled again.